The days of the suburban dream may be waning, which could lead to a big shake-up in the home-building industry. This would mean a complete cultural shift for Phoenix, which always has based its economic prospects on its ability to grow first with new homes, and then with new business locations.

Or, as recoveries from past recessions might suggest, it may just be a bigger blip on the radar for developers aiming to make a profit by turning desert land into the next great community.

In her new book, “The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving,” Leigh Gallagher offers evidence that suburban sprawl has become costly in recent years. She also points to research showing cookie-cutter suburbs won’t be nearly as popular among urban-minded millennials, who are marrying later and having smaller families.

For municipalities, the costs of building and maintaining infrastructure, as well as providing services including police and fire, are much greater per-capita in low-density areas, according to Gallagher, who also is assistant managing editor of Fortune magazine. And, generally speaking, property tax revenue coming from those areas covers only up to 65 cents of every dollar’s worth of liability, she said.

For many suburbanites, transportation costs between home and work have become like a second mortgage with the past decade’s spike in gas prices.

In her book, Gallagher notes a study conducted in the early 2000s by the Center for Neighborhood Technology, which focused on a master-planned community 30 miles from Atlanta (comparable to the distance between DMB Associates' Eastmark and downtown Phoenix). Within that community, roughly 30 percent of the average household income went toward housing — and about the same amount went toward transportation.

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